dendrite/docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to Dendrite

Everyone is welcome to contribute to Dendrite! We aim to make it as easy as possible to get started.

Please ensure that you sign off your contributions! See Sign Off section below.

Getting up and running

See INSTALL.md for instructions on setting up a running dev instance of dendrite, and CODE_STYLE.md for the code style guide.

As of May 2019, we're not using gb anymore, which is the tool we had been using for managing our dependencies. We're now using Go modules. To build Dendrite, run the build.sh script at the root of this repository (which runs go install under the hood), and to run unit tests, run go test ./... (which should pick up any unit test and run it). There are also build/scripts for linting and doing a build/test/lint run.

As of February 2020, we are deprecating support for Go 1.11 and Go 1.12 and are now targeting Go 1.13 or later. Please ensure that you are using at least Go 1.13 when developing for Dendrite - our CI will lint and run tests against this version.

Continuous Integration

When a Pull Request is submitted, continuous integration jobs are run automatically to ensure the code builds and is relatively well-written. The jobs are run on Buildkite, and the Buildkite pipeline configuration can be found in Matrix.org's pipelines repository.

If a job fails, click the "details" button and you should be taken to the job's logs.

Click the details button on the failing buildstep

Scroll down to the failing step and you should see some log output. Scan the logs until you find what it's complaining about, fix it, submit a new commit, then rinse and repeat until CI passes.

Running CI Tests Locally

To save waiting for CI to finish after every commit, it is ideal to run the checks locally before pushing, fixing errors first. This also saves other people time as only so many PRs can be tested at a given time.

To execute what Buildkite tests, first run ./build/scripts/build-test-lint.sh; this script will build the code, lint it, and run go test ./... with race condition checking enabled. If something needs to be changed, fix it and then run the script again until it no longer complains. Be warned that the linting can take a significant amount of CPU and RAM.

Once the code builds, run Sytest according to the guide in docs/sytest.md so you can see whether something is being broken and whether there are newly passing tests.

If these two steps report no problems, the code should be able to pass the CI tests.

Picking Things To Do

If you're new then feel free to pick up an issue labelled good first issue. These should be well-contained, small pieces of work that can be picked up to help you get familiar with the code base.

Once you're comfortable with hacking on Dendrite there are issues lablled as help wanted, these are often slightly larger or more complicated pieces of work but are hopefully nonetheless fairly well-contained.

We ask people who are familiar with Dendrite to leave the good first issue issues so that there is always a way for new people to come and get involved.

Getting Help

For questions related to developing on Dendrite we have a dedicated room on Matrix #dendrite-dev:matrix.org where we're happy to help.

For more general questions please use #dendrite:matrix.org.

Sign off

We ask that everyone who contributes to the project signs off their contributions, in accordance with the DCO.